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Jun
25
Outsource or be outsourced?
Filed Under outsourcing | Comments Off
Photo by Paul Keller
Soon it will be possible to outsource most of our employment to overseas countries — mind-numbing and body-destroying factory jobs have been heading overseas for years — and companies are now sending legal work, IT and other white-collar assignments overseas.
Your local newspaper might be part of the next great industry that will originate overseas via outsourcing because the work of putting together a paper is cheaper in India. Several papers are already using Indian companies to edit the pages of American newspapers.
Business Week reports that the Orange County Register will outsource copy editing to overseas workers during a one-month trial. Officials at the newspaper said sending the paper overseas to be edited will improve the paper’s local focus — possibly by reducing expenses so that workers won’t have to be laid off. Feel free to insert your joke here about how it is deemed necessary to send a newspaper overseas to improve it’s local focus. (H/T to fellow Indiana blogger Ruth Holladay for spotting the story).
Some might say that it is great that mind-numbing office jobs, such as copy editing and years-long discovery document review of ever proliferating terabytes of ESI from company hard-drives and email archives is going overseas because it could free us up to advance our personal and national economies by focusing more on creative enterprises.
Could the end of dull and repetitive assignments free us up to pursue our highest callings to figure out the next great solutions to life’s problems? Or, will we suffer the fate of the buggy whip workers who lost their jobs and were never heard from again because they failed to adapt to changing economic challenges and opportunities?
Might we reach a time when we will all be bosses sending the tedious tasks overseas to be completed? Tim Ferriss advocates outsourcing your own work assignments, including our own personal assignments to free up time to travel the world and make money on the internet and other ventures.
Could it be that the way to “beat” outsourcing is to embrace it wholeheartedly?
Video: OC Register Outsources Editing To India
Video: Fired!
Mar
30
Overseas Legal Salaries Rise With Outsourcing
Filed Under economy, law, outsourcing | 2 Comments
Interesting news from the world of outsourcing jobs that Americans used to do.
Lawyers in India are receiving increases in their starting salaries as a result of legal outsourcing.
According to Legal Blog Watch, associates starting at Indian law firms will earn slightly less than $30,000.00 per year now.
To compete with foreign firms, large domestic Indian firms have been forced to increase pay, either through salary hikes, end-of-year bonuses or promotions. New associates earn around 12 lakh rupees per year, while senior and principal associates may earn anywhere between 35 and 80 lakhs (one “lakh” is the equivalent of 100,000 rupees, so according to this currency converter, a new associate earns the equivalent of $29,887, while a senior lawyer makes $199,252.
Indian legal salaries are not quite up to the level of starting legal salaries in America, but they are getting closer — meaning that cost savings gained by sending work overseas might lessen as overseas salaries near those for United States workers.
There is still an incentive for large law firms to send work overseas because of the cost savings over employing someone in the United States, especially when some big city law firms are paying their upper echelon starting associates $160K+ per year. (The median salary is $62,000 per year).
Writes Bill Henderson in Empirical Legal Studies, the average starting salary at a small law firm is $50,000 as of 2006.
Let’s face it: $40K to $55K per year is just not enough to pay down the avg. $85,000 debt (especially as interest rates climb) and still enjoy any kind of lifestyle that a professional degree is presumed to confer. The national median starting salary for a 2 to 10 lawyer firm is $50,000. There are a lot of struggling alumni out there. And do we really need more law schools? For many, getting a JD is a very risky financial proposition, especially when you factor in bar passage.
